PDD are a class of disorders defined by various diagnostic systems, including the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th edition (DSM-IV). Various disorders are contained within the PDD designation, including Autistic Disorder, Rett's Disorder, Childhood Disintegrative Disorder, PDD-NOS (PDD—Not Otherwise Specified), and Asperger's Disorder. These various conditions are characterized by differing degrees of impairment relating to social interaction and communications skills. All of the variations of PDD negatively impact the ability of children to interpret and regulate sensory information, initiate and maintain conversations, and identify and respond appropriately to social cues. PDD can be characterized by multiple distortions in the development of basic psychological functions that are involved in the development of social skills and language, such as attention, perception reality testing and motor movement. These disorders can also be accompanied by manifestations of disturbances of organization, distractibility, impulsivity, restlessness, and other disturbances of language and/or social behavior. Many conventional methods, such as dietary alteration, medication, and behavioral modification have been used for treating individuals diagnosed with PDD related disorders.
Treatments of various types have long been used to treat various developmental disabilities of children, including PDD. Past treatments for PDD in children range from treatment with prescription drugs to behavioral programs that employ a wide range of individual therapies (e.g., speech therapy, occupational therapy, scripting therapy, drug therapies, play therapy, vitamin therapy, and various applied behavior analysis therapies) in an effort to produce consistent and repeatable results. However, past treatments and therapies have met with varying degrees of success, none have consistently produced desired results, and many require large amounts of personalization based on the abilities of each subject child. Progress in the field of PDD has been difficult due to a number of factors, including the breadth of the behavior that falls into the category of PDD, a large increase of diagnosis of persons with PDD in the last decade, and the multitude of individualized symptoms that can be exhibited by children who have PDD, which may require different approaches. Thus, there is a need for a method for treating children with PDD that provides a relatively standardized regimen of behavioral treatment steps. Furthermore, there is a need for a method for treating children with PDD which utilizes a combination of therapies on a repetitive schedule that is easy to implement in classroom situations in which numerous children with PDD are treated simultaneously as a group with the same combination of therapy steps.
It has been recognized that individuals who are non-verbal or speech-impaired and/or diagnosed with a PDD have many problems in terms of communicating with others. Attempts have been made in the art to improve the communication skills, effective semantic and/or syntactic skills of such individuals, which include devices and techniques geared towards establishing communication and an increased vocabulary, morphology and syntax.
In one example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,056,549 discloses a communication and teaching aid in the form of a book structure having a plurality of movably mounted pages each of which serves as a support structure for a plurality of demonstration pieces. Each of the demonstration pieces have an alpha-numeric display or a pictorial representation with a word or phrase label where the informative indicia is representative of common objects, activities, statements, phrases, questions, answers, etc. The demonstration pieces are affixed to the movably mounted pages such that the informative indicia on the various demonstration pieces are arranged to create an individualized word-labeled pictorial display. This type of visual support can be useful in treating PDD, but a disadvantage is the lack of overall structure in which such visual supports can be also used as a part of a broader therapy based teaching interaction to multiply the comprehension of the student and accordingly the advantages of such visual supports. Visual supports can be video-taped sequences of actors displaying a chosen set of role-playing activities as well.